[News] The Suffocating Occupation of Palestine is Now a Series of War Crimes

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/30/the-suffocating-occupation-of-palestine-is-now-a-series-of-war-crimes/>
The Suffocating Occupation of Palestine is Now a Series of War Crimes
Vijay Prashad - October 30, 2023
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[image: IMG_6424-680x510.jpeg]

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On October 24, it became clear to the United Nations (UN) that the
sustained bombardment of Gaza—which had already killed 6,500 people
(including at least 35 UN employees)—had made this part of Palestine
unviable for human life. Over two million people live in this slim section
of land on the Mediterranean Sea. Since 1948, the refugees who live here
have relied on UN assistance, with the United Nations building an entire
agency (UNRWA) in 1949 for that purpose. UN Secretary General António
Guterres told
<https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0>
the UN Security Council that within days the UN would run out of fuel for
its trucks, which carry the minimal relief that crosses into Gaza from
Egypt and supports the 660,000 Palestinians who have fled their homes to
come to UN compounds across Gaza. The trucks carry “a drop of aid in an
ocean of need,” Guterres said. “The people of Gaza need continuous aid
delivery at a level that corresponds to the enormous needs. That aid must
be delivered without restrictions.”

Guterres’s statement, delivered in a calm voice, did however depart from
the sentiment of disregard that defines the statements of European and
North American leaders—many of whom have rushed to Tel Aviv to stand beside
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledge their full-throated
support for Israel. History matters. Guterres said that the problems now
befalling the Palestinians of Gaza did not begin on October 7, when Hamas
and other Palestinian factions broke through the apartheid security barrier
and attacked the settlements that border Gaza. His statement on the
situation over the past decades is factual, based as it was on thousands of
pages of UN reports and resolutions: “It is important to also recognize the
attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have
been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their
land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their
economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their
hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.” The
image of the “suffocating occupation” is utterly accurate.

After Guterres made these remarks, Israeli authorities—as if on cue—demanded
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67215620> the resignation of
the UN Secretary-General. Israel’s permanent representative to the UN Gilad
Erdan accused Guterres—absurdly—of “justifying terrorism.” Saying that
Guterres “once again distorts and twists reality,” Erdan noted that his
government would not
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/25/israel-to-refuse-visas-to-un-officials-after-guterres-speech-on-gaza-war>
permit the UN Humanitarian Aid chief Martin Griffiths from crossing the
Rafah border into Gaza to oversee the distribution of relief. “In what
world do you live?” asked Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen of Guterres.
At the UN Security Council, meanwhile, the United States vetoed resolutions
for a ceasefire, while China and Russia vetoed a U.S. resolution that said
Israel had a right to defend itself and Iran must stop its export of arms.
The United States has deeply politicized the atmosphere in the UN, using
its own resolutions to rally support—unsuccessfully—for Israel, while
attacking the Palestinians (and bizarrely Iran) in the process.

*Nothing Neutral About the United States*

The United States has never been an unbiased arbiter over the region, given
its close linkage to Israel from at least the 1960s. Billions of dollars of
weapons sold to Israel, billions of dollars of aid to Israel, and punctual
statements in favor of Israel have defined the relationship between
Washington and Tel Aviv. During all the negotiations between the
Palestinians and Israelis, the United States has played a game of
duplicity: pretending to be neutral, but in fact, using its immense power
to neuter Palestinians and to strengthen Israel. The Oslo Accords, which
led to the creation of a powerless Bantustan run by the Palestinian
Authority, was negotiated with the United States with its hands on the pen.
Oslo led to the creation of a process that has resulted in the attrition of
Palestinian control over East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as the
garrotting of the Palestinians in Gaza—all of this combined being the
“suffocating occupation” that Guterres talked about.

Since 2007, when Israeli troops left Gaza and then hemmed it in by land and
sea walls that made Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison, Israel has
routinely bombed the Palestinians who live there. Each time there is a
bombardment, one worse than the next, the United States government has
backed Israel fully and re-armed it during the bombardment. Calls for a
ceasefire have been blocked by Washington in the UN Security Council since
the destructive bombing of Gaza called Operation Cast Lead (2008-09). This
time, on cue, the United States has provided Israel with diplomatic
support, with U.S. President Joe Biden going to Tel Aviv and with the
United States going as far as adopting a flagrant lie that Israel did not
bomb al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on October 17. Before Biden got to
Israel, the United States sent two major naval battle groups into the
eastern Mediterranean—two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower
and the USS Gerald Ford, with their supporting naval vessels in two strike
groups. Since then, the U.S. has moved missile defense systems into the
region to strengthen the Israeli armed forces. The movement of these forces
comes alongside billions of dollars spent annually by the U.S. to arm
Israel, including $15 billion in extra military assistance over this recent
period. These wars are not merely Israel’s wars. These are the wars of
Israel and the United States, with its Western allies in tow.

*Gaza Will Become Mosul*

Meanwhile, the United States has sent senior military officials to work
closely with the Israeli generals. One of these officials is a three-star
Marine lieutenant general James Glynn, who has been sent
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/us/politics/israel-us-gaza-invasion.html>
to “help the Israelis with the challenges of fighting an urban war.” Glynn
and others are in the Israeli military chain of command not to make
decisions for Israel but to assist them. Glynn was part of the U.S.
Operation Inherent Resolve against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS) in the years following 2014, when the United States bombed Mosul and
Raqqa (Iraq) to eject ISIS from those cities. As if to underline Glynn’s
Mosul and Raqqa experience, U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told
Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant that he had himself been involved in
Operation Inherent Resolve in 2016-2017 when Austin headed U.S. Central
Command. Austin’s comments and Glynn’s deployment to Israel are in
anticipation of the ground war that is expected against Gaza. “The first
thing that everyone should know,” Austin told
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxtXjuWtU98> ABC News, “and I think
everyone does know, is that urban combat is extremely difficult.”

Indeed, Austin’s comment about the difficulty of urban combat, particularly
with the Mosul and Raqqa experiences in mind, is appropriate. In 2017, the
Associated Press (AP) reported
<https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-only-on-ap-islamic-state-group-bbea7094fb954838a2fdc11278d65460>
that the U.S. attack on Mosul had resulted in between 9,000 and 11,000
civilian casualties. Very few people recall the brutality of that war and
the numbers of civilian dead are barely noted. If Mosul is the example
before the United States and Israel for the ground war to come in Gaza,
there are some differences that should be borne in mind. ISIS had only two
years to dig in its defenses, while the Palestinian factions have been
preparing for such an eventuality since at least 2005 and are therefore
better prepared to fight the Israeli army one ruined street after the next.
It appears from all reports that the morale of the Palestinian factions is
far greater than that of the Israeli army, which means that the Palestinian
factions will fight with much more force and with much less to lose than
ISIS (whose fighters slipped out of the city and vanished into the
countryside).

In both Mosul and Raqqa, when the U.S. aerial bombardment began, tens of
thousands of civilians fled the cities for the countryside alongside some
ISIS fighters to wait for the destruction to commence and then end. If they
had remained in Mosul and Raqqa, the civilian casualties would have been
twice the number reported by AP. Mosul’s population was just 1.6 million,
smaller than the 2.3 million residents of Gaza—so the numbers of civilian
casualties would have to be adjusted upwards. Palestinians in Gaza are
trapped and cannot escape to the countryside, unlike the residents of Mosul
and Raqqa. They can go nowhere as Israeli tanks enter Gaza, guns blazing.
The civilian deaths in Gaza, already outrageously high due to the
uncontrolled bombing by Israel, will be unimaginable during this ground war
that began on October 27. Gaza, already a ruin, will be left a cemetery.

*This article was produced by **Globetrotter* <https://globetrotter.media/>
*.*

*Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal:
Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August
2022).*
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